Crushed by exhaustion, you may dream of a competitor's head morphing into a Pokemon-like demon - and then open your eyes and still see it. The next day you will quit the race.
To fill your queasy stomach during your third 112-mile bike ride, you will discover the best way to eat a sausage-and-egg sandwich: shove it in your mouth and let it slowly dissolve.
![Ultramarathons: Endurance tests of body and mind.](http://web.archive.org./web/20171203152209im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/j/s/q/x/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gsjc5e.png/1478722142346.jpg)
After 500 miles on a bike, 10 in the water and more than 100 on foot, it will make perfect sense to grab a branch and a broomstick in a desperate bid to propel yourself - like a giant mutant insect - the last 31 miles. It will not be enough. You will collapse on the road.
Seasick, miles into the swim, you will vomit. Twice.
![Competitors have to dive deep into themselves.](http://web.archive.org./web/20171203152209im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/j/s/s/d/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gsjc5e.png/1478722142346.jpg)
Neck cramps will attack so fiercely on the bike that your head will slump. You will go cross-eyed and nearly crash.
The trees will keep moving. You will swear bugs are crawling over your face, even when they are not. The cracks in the road will form smiley faces. None of this is real - but it is 3 am, and you have dozens of miles still to run.
The sores from chafing are so bad you will think nothing of tugging open your shorts and squirting in ointment in full view of strangers. There is no modesty here; they seem to understand.
Actually, no. They don't really understand. They are not competing in this race. And nobody not competing in this race understands.
![Far from over.](http://web.archive.org./web/20171203152209im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/j/s/r/y/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gsjc5e.png/1478722142346.jpg)
'If You Have to Ask, You Will Never Know'
All that misery and more menaced the competitors who had decided, for their own unfathomable reasons, that a single Ironman race was not enough. They had entered an endurance event called the Virginia Quintuple Anvil Triathlon - five Ironman-length races, totaling 703 miles of swimming, biking and running, over five days.
![How much suffering is enough? Athletes in ultras are taped and massaged and medicated.](http://web.archive.org./web/20171203152209im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/j/s/r/v/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gsjc5e.png/1478722142346.jpg)
All the legs were done in confined loops (30 laps in a section of the lake, 101 laps of a more-than-5-mile course for the bike and 75 laps of a nearly 2-mile course for the run) at Lake Anna State Park, earning the course the moniker "the squirrel cage."
The competitors - several of whom have formed a tight, familylike circle, having seen one another often at these kinds of races - were a mishmash of the superfit and the merely fit, military veterans (including a couple of former commandos), driven professionals and simple thrill-seekers who found plenty.
Most were middle-aged, most had grown children who would not miss them much in the long hours of training, and most had supportive spouses and family members - in some cases triathletes themselves.
Some of those family members came to watch their loved ones destroy their bodies, if not their minds, for nearly a week because ... because ... why? "If you have to ask," more than a few racers replied, "you will never know."
You may have heard that idea expressed at, say, the regular old Ironman triathlon, which is normally considered the Mount Everest of the sport: a 3.86 kilometre swim, then a 180 kilometre bike ride and then a marathon (42 kilometres) in the heat of Hawaii. If you could finish it, you were, well, an Ironman (or woman).
Then people began flocking to the challenge. Ironman grew. Races popped up on every continent except Antarctica. Even half-Ironman versions proliferated.
The first Ironman was in Hawaii in 1978, with 15 competitors. Today, there are 140 races to choose from, drawing 260,000 competitors.
But once you have swum 2.4 miles, biked 180 kilometres and run 42 kilometres in a day, why stop there?
As early as 1984, a double Ironman race was held in Alabama. And then a triple. And then a quintuple. And then a deca (10 Ironmans in 10 days) and a double deca, and you see where this is going.
Wayne Kurtz, who is considered the godfather of the so-called ultratriathletes, and seven others did 30 Ironman-length races in 30 days in Italy in 2013. He wrote about it in a book called Stronger Than Iron.
"With this kind of test," he wrote, "these athletes were not racing for money or fame but purely to discover what is possible in terms of endurance limits."
How did it go?
"I was hit by a car three times," Kurtz said in an interview. "It was a zoo. We're lucky nobody died."
That triple deca is considered the outer limit of physical performance. (One athlete recently claimed to have done 50 Ironmans in 50 days, but with some of that mileage done on an elliptical machine, traditionalists have scoffed.)
One of the more popular races is the Quintuple Anvil, which grew to 16 competitors this year from seven in 2013, its inaugural year. Double and triple versions are held at the same time. (By the time you consider a quadruple, you might as well just do a quintuple. That is the mentality here.)
"Anvil" is a tongue-in-cheek spin on "Ironman," which is run by a large corporation fiercely protective of its trademark and not keen on letting other races use it. (An Ironman lawyer told the Anvil organisers a couple of years ago not to use "Ironman" in their materials.)
Competitors may choose one of two ways to mete out their self-flagellation: do one Ironman-length triathlon a day for five days, abiding by a 17-hour cutoff, or do all of it continuously - a 19 kilometre swim, followed by a 900 kilometre bike ride and a 210 kilometre run - stretched out over 5 and a half days, broken up however you wish.
The 1-by-5 variant means you can get a longish night's sleep, but you have to get up for a 7 am start every day - a fitness nut's Groundhog Day.
The continuous version usually involves a fair amount of sleep deprivation, in particular to get the long bike and run legs done. This is the fitness nut's Walking Dead: By the end, the mind is shot from exhaustion, and the legs and feet have taken so much punishment that hardly anybody is doing much running.
My own triathlon experience has been limited to a few "sprint" races of various short distances, some Olympic-distance races (a swim of just under 1.6 kilometres, a 38 kilometre ride and a 9.9 kilometre run) and one half-Ironman (1.9 kilometre swim, 90 kilometre ride, 21 kilometre run).
The half-Ironman, done in the tropical heat of Panama, left me staggering at the end and had me pretty sure that I had found my limit - and it wasn't happy to see me. Just beyond the finish line, there was a nice ice bath, which I felt like moving into permanently.
When I told this to Shanda Hill, who ended up one of the top finishers at the Anvil, she smiled and, with the evangelical fervour common among the racers, started pushing me to at least do an Ironman-length race.
"It's all mental," Hill, 34, said, "and I am living proof."
By that, she meant that she had not devoted long hours to swimming, biking or running. But she did spend a lot of time in the gym and was also fit from a youth of championship BMX racing, a pursuit that ended several years ago when she was hit by an SUV while riding a bike home.
She began running after that, moved up to ultramarathons and, before long, was doing her first Ironman, in 2014. Then came a double race, and by her logic, if you are going to move up to a triple, you might as well just do the quintuple.
This was her fifth triathlon overall, and like many of the other athletes, she would insist endurance triathlons had as much, if not more, to do with the limits of the mind as with those of the body.
Lisa Wei-Haas, who did a double, said: "Shorter triathlons are about pain. Endurance triathlons are about suffering. How much suffering can you take?"
Everybody here found the answer. But not everybody finished. Not everybody got to bang that real anvil five times, as competitors do after crossing the finish line and parading, Olympics-style, with the flag of their country and their national anthem blaring from a tinny speaker.
Facing the Consequences
Facedown on a cot, near midnight in the middle of the race, Will Turner had a massage therapist kneading his muscles, trying to coax some life into them.
He was, at 58, an Ironman veteran who only last year moved up to multiple-distance races by doing a double Ironman-length race.
He believes in big dreams, he said, and he dedicated his entry to his recently deceased mother. This race, the continuous Quintuple Anvil, would also be a test toward a bigger goal: 60 Ironman-length races, every six days, when he turned 60.
The test was not going well.
"I have been hanging out in the pain cave," he said.
Like other racers, Turner had a group of people attending to him, although as a resident of nearby Richmond, he had more than anybody else.
He also had a table full of food and drinks.
At the beginning of the race, the tables and their goods were neatly arranged - water, electrolyte and muscle-recovery drinks, crackers, soups, cereal, cookies, doughnuts - under large party tents.
By the middle of the race, the tents resembled a M.A.S.H. unit - discarded gauze, wrappers, bottles and the other detritus left over from trying to keep a body in one piece.
The food game also intensified: pizzas, fast-food burgers, hot dogs - real food loaded with calories and carbohydrates to sustain long periods of exercise.
"May I have a pumpkin bread?" Turner asked as he eased to his feet and prepared to run while a friend fished out his request from the table.
"This is the most I will ever be pampered in my life," Turner said with a tight smile he would wear even in some of the more painful moments ahead.
Someone grabbed a pole resembling a baker's rolling pin and massaged his calf muscles.
The race rules allow for such assistance, but the competitors must keep track of the rest periods eating away at their time.
Limited medical assistance is permitted, too.
A doctor and a nurse dispense ibuprofen, pop blisters when necessary and even give shots of lidocaine to ailing tendons (a small dose that is meant to get a faltering competitor moving and does not last long).
Competitors are tested before the race for performance-enhancing drug use and, if a course record is set, afterward, too.
Steve Kirby, the race director at U.S.A. Ultra Triathlon, which oversees the Anvil and other endurance triathlons, acknowledged the testing protocols were not as stringent as those of Ironman and other more famous races, but Anvil is a lower-key, lower-rent event, he said.
"I know we go waayyyy beyond the other races in the amount of medical care we provide to keep the racers going," Kirby said in an email. "Most of the others, they would be pulled from the race and patched up and sent home. We are a different breed ;-)."
Most of the finishers are patched up and sent home, too - with festering blisters, stress fractures, warped tendons and other injuries.
Dr. Martin Hoffman, a professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at University of California, Davis, who is an ultramarathon competitor and researcher, said such short-term damage was well-known. Less understood are the long-term consequences.
Ultra-endurance athletes appear to have an increased rate of cardiac arrhythmias, or unusual heart beats, most likely because of scarring of the heart known as fibrosis. But what, if any, danger that poses has been hard to pin down, Hoffman said.
"Exactly why the fibrosis occurs probably isn't understood, but seems to be an adaptive response to this sort of exercise," he said.
These ultratriathletes, however, tend not to dwell on the wear and tear of their bodies, at least once the race is done.
"I know this is not good for my body," said Jay Lonsway, a urologist who completed the quintuple. "But it is good for my soul."
New York Times